U.S. Sending Warning as Kosovo Strife Flares

WASHINGTON —  The Clinton administration Sunday dispatched special envoy Richard Holbrooke to deliver a final warning to Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic that he faces NATO airstrikes unless he accepts a peace settlement in Kosovo. Meanwhile, the embattled Serbian province slipped closer toward full-scale war.

Holbrooke’s efforts at a last-minute deal with Milosevic are likely to be complicated by an attack Sunday evening by gunmen who killed four Serbian police officers at a checkpoint in Kosovo’s capital, Pristina, after government security forces attacked the mountain headquarters of ethnic Albanian guerrillas seeking independence for their province.

The four police officers, who were combat trained and carrying AK-47 assault rifles, were killed while checking cars in Pristina’s central Velanija district, an official statement said.

The slayings are certain to stoke Serbian anger at what many consider Western support for Kosovar Albanian terrorists.

In Washington, the administration continued its public expression of support for the ethnic Albanians, who signed the peace plan last week in Paris. Milosevic “has a clear choice: He can move to the path of peace, as the Kosovars have, or he can face punishment from NATO,” said Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, President Clinton’s national security advisor, speaking on the CBS-TV show “Face the Nation.”

“I think we owe it to the American people, we owe it to our military people, our allies, to make that final attempt,” he said.

In Sunday’s attack in Pristina, gunmen opened fire with automatic weapons about 6 p.m. from a vehicle stopped at the checkpoint, fatally wounding two officers who were standing on the street and another two who were sitting in a patrol car. A fifth officer, whose name suggests he is ethnic Albanian, was slightly wounded.

Police said the attackers escaped toward a forest on the outskirts of the city. Police reinforcements poured into the area and closed all roads leading in and out of Pristina.

The slayings compounded fears that a war waged mainly in Kosovo’s countryside is on the verge of engulfing its cities. Pristina was already tense after several terrorist bombings in recent months, and the growing threat of North Atlantic Treaty Organization airstrikes has turned the city into a virtual ghost town at night.

The alliance has about 400 warplanes, approximately half of them from the U.S., on standby for an attack against military targets in Yugoslavia.

The air assault would begin with cruise missiles aimed at the Yugoslav military’s sophisticated air-defense system, which would put NATO pilots at great risk, the Pentagon warned last week.

NATO commanders have shortened the trigger time for airstrikes from 48 hours to only a few hours, an alliance official said in Brussels.

The peace deal would force Milosevic to allow 28,000 NATO peacekeeping troops into Kosovo, which he sees as a violation of Yugoslavia’s sovereignty. Kosovo is a southern province of Serbia, the dominant of Yugoslavia’s two republics.

Ethnic Albanians outnumber Serbs 9 to 1 in Kosovo, and most say they want independence, but the peace agreement signed in France would give them only limited self-rule within Serbia for the next three years.

Serbian security forces launched a major offensive against ethnic Albanian villages last week after the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA, signed the peace agreement.

Clinton Working On Unified Allied Action

In Washington on Sunday, Clinton talked by telephone with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, seeking to make sure the United States and its allies were working together on the problem.

Administration officials made it plain that military action could start within days. They said it would not necessarily be delayed until after a visit by Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny M. Primakov, who is scheduled to be in Washington from Tuesday through Friday. Primakov’s Russian government maintains ties with Milosevic and has opposed the use of NATO force against him.

“Prime Minister Primakov is going to have to decide himself what it is he wishes to do,” Undersecretary of State Thomas Pickering said on CNN’s “Late Edition.”

Asked specifically whether the Clinton administration might ask the Russian prime minister to postpone his trip, Berger replied: “I think that would be his decision to make, if it came to that.”

The decision to carry out one last round of talks with Milosevic apparently was made during a meeting of senior administration officials at the White House on Saturday afternoon. Holbrooke is expected to meet with Milosevic in Yugoslavia tonight. In announcing Holbrooke’s mission, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in a written statement Sunday that he will tell Milosevic “that NATO airstrikes . . . are being prepared.”

As an assistant secretary of State, Holbrooke played a leading role in persuading Milosevic to accept a peace settlement in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995, and he has served as a special envoy to the Balkans since that time. Clinton has appointed him to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, but his nomination is stalled in the Senate.

The prospect of impending military action in Kosovo brought out divisions among Republican leaders.

Assistant Senate Majority Leader Don Nickles of Oklahoma said he had “serious reservations about us getting involved in this military conflict.”

“I hope that we don’t start a bombing war with Serbia,” Nickles said on ABC-TV’s “This Week.” “That is an act of war. . . . We’re going to intervene in a civil war.”

By contrast, former Sen. Bob Dole said he not only favored military action against Milosevic but thought it should start immediately, without waiting for a final warning of the sort that Holbrooke is to deliver.

“It’s time for action, time to make a decision, and I hope it’s done very quickly,” said Dole, the Republican presidential nominee in 1996. “Otherwise, [Milosevic] could amass more troops and you could have another massacre.

“What we have in Kosovo and what we had in Bosnia was genocide, and that’s why I think we should intervene. . . . I don’t see any reason to send anybody else there. I don’t think we have to make any more overtures to Milosevic. We’ve done enough of that.”

In Kosovo’s Drenica region Sunday, a stronghold of the KLA, plumes of black smoke poured from burning houses in Donje Prekaz after Serbian security forces seized the village.

At one Yugoslav army post, troops had four heavy artillery guns aimed at Donje Prekaz and surrounding villages facing the strategic Cicavica mountains, the very battleground where Kosovo’s war began just over a year ago.

The widening offensive also struck the guerrillas’ general headquarters in the mountain village of Likoc for the first time this year, refugees escaping the area said Sunday.

“Many people are left behind, but they went into the woods,” said Hysen Hamza, 47, who fled with his six children, ages 4 to 14. “I heard there are 15,000 people, but I don’t know.”

The fighting has forced at least 50,000 Kosovo Albanians from their homes in the past month, at least half of them in the past several days, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates.

The attack on Likoc began about 10 a.m. and forced hundreds of villagers to flee in wagons pulled by farmers’ tractors and horses. Most of the refugees were women and children, or the elderly.

Fearing Arrest, Men Stay Put

The men remained, clustered in groups around pocket-size shortwave radios to listen for news of the Serbian advance, and waiting to hear what NATO would do about it.

“The men are staying because they are afraid to go into town where they can be arrested,” Fatime Asuani, 36, said from a wagon packed with a dozen refugees escaping Likoc across a valley, along a muddy track.

Three Kosovar Albanians were killed and 200 men detained Saturday when gunmen in white uniforms and black masks ordered people from their homes, the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Information Center alleged.

About 15 or 20 of the masked gunmen arrived with armored vehicles and drove out villagers from Globare, about 13 miles south of Srbica, around 7 a.m., Flamur Moriija, 27, said through an interpreter.

Watson reported from Pristina, Yugoslavia, and Mann from Washington.